


wink of the eye and winking stars

by deathrae



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Sort Of, but so far it's just the first one, how tf do i tag this, second chapter has references to episodes 5 and 7, so have 1k of 13 and yaz talking about kids, third chapter set after 'Ghost Monument', which popped into my head and wouldn't go away, you know what let's call this a drabble collection cuz maybe I'll get more ideas
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-08-29 18:08:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16749061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathrae/pseuds/deathrae
Summary: Some scattered thoughts on the Thirteenth Doctor in all her starlight brilliance and void-black depths.(Title from a Kerouac quote because apparently no matter what fandom I write in I'm a pretentious asshole.)





	1. Sexist Questions

It didn’t occur to her to ask until they were in a park in the distant future. Somewhere Earth-like, or at least Earth-like enough that the four of them were all relatively relaxed. Much as they joked about the dangerous places the Doctor took them, those really _were_ the exceptions to the rule.

Most of the time.

But here, at least, seemed calm enough. Ryan and Graham were engaged in yet another moderately-playful bickering session over flavors of ice cream on a bench a little ways away. She was sitting beside the Doctor, who was in a rare state of rest. She sat with her chin on her hand and her elbow on her thigh, her eyes tracking other park patrons. In particular a young girl who was jogging in increasingly wide orbits around her exasperated-looking mother.

“Doctor?” she asked.

“Yes Yaz?”

“Mind if I ask you a question?”

The Doctor was hard to describe. The English dictionary didn’t have words that quite captured her. Words like _vibrant_ did the job, but they weren’t quite right. They weren’t big enough. It was like trying to describe a force of nature, or a star. Yes, a star is bright, but it’s so much more.

Maybe that’s why it was so... so _much_ to have all that attention directly on you. That moment of low energy, of idleness, ended abruptly as the Doctor sat up and turned those star-bright eyes on her. “Of course! You don’t need to ask me that, Yaz, you know that. I love questions. Questions are what the world turns on. I _love_ questions. Though, really, only slightly less than I love answers. But since one leads to the other, well, it all works out!”

She laughed. _Funny_ was another word that was not quite enough to describe the unironic, unapologetic dynamo that had plucked her and her friends off a street in Sheffield and right into an adventure.

“Well, it’s just that it’s a bit personal.”

The brightness of that star dimmed, suddenly, ever so slightly, and Yaz knew she’d been right to preface. There was a lot they didn’t know about the Doctor. There probably always would be. But they’d all glimpsed it—the weight of the stories behind that young face and those old, _old_ eyes. She’d never told them _not to_ , but there were things the three of them had agreed—unanimously and without ever actually discussing it—they wouldn’t ask.

“Right,” the Doctor said, a little more weakly, then bolstered herself, as Yaz had seen her do so many times before. “Well, it’s hardly my place to curb your curiosity, Yaz. Ask your bit-personal-question.”

“So, with you being an alien—two hearts and all that, I remember—your people, your. Uh, your species, I guess. Do they...” She let her gaze slide to the young girl again, then back. “How do you have kids?”

This was apparently not as well-guarded territory, because the Doctor’s expression softened with relief and she let out a breathless laugh, slumping into her seat on the bench. “Oh that!” she said. “Oh that’s rather interesting, actually.” Her manner changed again, suddenly, like a sharp twist in the wind. “Now hold on.”

“What?” Yaz asked, scanning around them on instinct. Had the Doctor sensed something? Something that didn’t belong?

“I’ve been traveling like this, as a man, for what, over a thousand years,” she said. The Doctor’s expression turned sour, her nose wrinkling up with distaste. Yaz relaxed by degrees. No danger after all. “Had with me maybe a couple dozen humans. Men and women alike. And yet all this time, hardly ever—no, _almost never_ —I’ve been asked that question.” She huffed out a breath. “I think I’m offended.” A pause, as she consulted herself. “Yes. Yes, I am offended.”

“Sorry,” Yaz said immediately. “I guess it _is_ a pretty sexist question.”

“No, what?” The stormclouds over her face vanished as suddenly as they’d formed. Trying to follow her moods sometimes was like trying to fly a kite in a hurricane. “No, don’t apologize. Not offended at you Yaz, never at you. It’s a good question. I don’t mind you asked. But hardly anyone ever asked me when I was a man. In all this time! And that doesn’t seem right, does it. Does that seem right to you?”

She blinked. “No, not particularly.”

The Doctor nodded decisively, as if Yaz’s opinion had been all she needed to settle her opinion. “Not right at all, never asking me when I was a man. Besides, plenty of species have offspring carried by the males. Like the Gifftan!”

“I remember,” Yaz said, trying not to smile in the face of the Doctor’s frustration.

“Plenty of species. And even when they don’t they’re a pretty important part of the process, I would think.” She scoffed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Shame, making all those assumptions. And shame on me, frankly, given I didn’t notice it till now.”

“Well, it’s all about perspective, i’nit?” The Doctor looked at her, interested, and Yaz found herself suddenly in that tiny star’s spotlight. “Er. What I mean is, you’ve never had this perspective before, if you’ve always been...”

“Regenerating,” the Doctor provided.

“Right, regenerating. As a man. It’s different now. _You’re_ different now.”

“I am,” the Doctor said, but a little hesitantly. She considered it, then said again, with more certainty, “I am. I am! That’s the whole point, you know, of the regeneration. Same sort of person, but with some details scrambled about.”

“Does it happen often? A man regenerating into a woman.”

The Doctor went quiet for a moment, considering, and Yaz was sure she was remembering something, some event she might never begin to comprehend.

“Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never written for the Who fandom before but this idea got into my brain and it seemed like a really fun way to see if I could write her voice, even a little bit. 13 is an interesting challenge to put on paper because I tend to be wordy and while she is still wordy, she speaks in very short, high-energy bursts of sentences, rather than meandering paragraphs. It's fun! So we'll see if this gets any more little pieces tacked on, but for now this is all I have in mind.
> 
> Only a couple more episodes left guys aaaaaa I'm excited. Not for it to end but to have this in our pockets to face 2019 with, y'know?


	2. On the Subject of Musicals

Yaz leaned against a rail in the console room with her nose resting on top of a to-go cup from their last planet-side visit, steam from the hot drink curling across her face in misty tendrils. It wasn’t a latte in the strictest sense, but the Doctor had sworn by it for a pick-me-up when you were tired of over-brewed and under-sweetened tea made in the TARDIS’ tiny kitchen. She hadn’t been wrong, that Yaz would agree: the drink stayed at the perfect temperature and tasted the way the air felt when you open the oven to check on a tray of biscuits. She was enjoying it, sipping slowly and watching the Doctor dance around the console of her ship, pulling levers and excitedly sharing with Yaz, Ryan, and Graham, all of whom were not strictly listening, all she knew about the legal complexities of interplanetary shipping lanes. Ryan had asked the otherwise innocuous question _how did Kerblam even get that big_ and it was all he had to do to set the woman on a fascinating but sort of exhausting tangent.

“You figure she ever slows down?” Graham said. He kept his voice down, for Yaz’s ears only, but he didn’t sound annoyed. There was a fondness to his tone, a good humor that Yaz held as well.

“She hasn’t so far,” Yaz reminded him.

“Good point. Then again, youth’s wasted on the young and all that.”

“D’you reckon?” she asked. “How old d’you suppose she is?”

“Well she looks like she can’t be more than 40,” he said.

“Oh sure, yeah, ‘cept when we met her she told me an’ Ryan that half an hour before, she’d been a white-haired Scotsman.”

Graham frowned, considering that. “That night, the night we met her. She said all that stuff about her body rebooting.”

“Exactly,” Yaz said. “I reckon she’s way older than she looks.”

“She did say something to me an’ Grace, there in the shop,” he said, thoughtful. “About how scary it is to die and be reborn. Figured it was a load o’crock then but now I know better. Maybe it wasn’t the first time she’s done it.”

“She could be old,” Yaz said, her eyes gone wide. “Like. Like _proper_ old.”

“Yeah,” he said, equally bewildered by the suggestion. “Only one way to find out though. Oi, Doc!”

Yaz almost smacked his arm, startled, but the Doctor had sprung up from her position over the controls and looked their way. Ryan cast them a deeply grateful look—evidently he was happy for the distraction.

“Yes Graham?” she said, grinning. “Did you have a question?”

“Yeah. Yaz an’ I here were just wonderin’ how old you are.”

Now Yaz did hit him, albeit not hard. “Graham!”

The Doctor laughed, propping one hand on her hip. “Come now Graham, you know better! Aren’t there rules an’ such, ‘bout askin’ a woman her age?”

Yaz hid a grin behind her hand as Graham blinked at her.

“Well it’s just,” he said, though a bit weakly, “It’s just you’re not an ordinary lady.”

“No I’m not,” the Doctor agreed, nodding sagely. “That is certainly true. Let’s just say I’m much, _much_ older than I look.”

“Like over a hundred?” Ryan said, eyebrows furrowed in his curiosity.

The Doctor didn’t look away from Yaz, but she winked. Actually _winked_. “Older than that.”

The three of them all goggled at her, and she waited patiently like a stage performer waiting for applause to subside.

“But,” Graham said finally, the first to break the silence. “But how do you do it? I mean aren’t you tired? I’m tired and I don’t do half the stuff you do when we’re runnin’ ‘round, planet to planet.”

“Do what, Graham?” she asked, head cocked to the side just slightly, like a puppy.

“The way you talk, the way you move...” He waved a hand, searching for words. “You have a time machine. You’re older than we can even comprehend. You’ve got all the universe at your disposal. But look at ya. You live your life like you’re runnin’ out of time.”

The Doctor’s face _lit up_ like a tiny sun, her mouth splitting open in an honest, guileless grin. Graham leaned back slightly against the rail, concerned. Yaz hastily took a sip of her drink to cover another laugh.

“What’d I say?” Graham asked, half under his breath.

“It’s a Hamilton reference,” Yaz explained, chuckling despite her better judgement. “Sorry, Doctor. I think that one was unintentional.”

“Oh. Right,” the Doctor said. She sagged a little, shoulders drooping, and her face scrunched up in mild disappointment. “That’s a shame.”


	3. Sartorial Struggles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor has some new habits to make and old ones to break.
> 
> Inspired by this iconic post: [iprayforangels.tumblr.com/post/80527496882/plushestrumpest-30secondstocalifornia](http://iprayforangels.tumblr.com/post/80527496882/plushestrumpest-30secondstocalifornia).

It wasn’t until after they’d left Desolation and tried to go home that the Doctor finally started to flag. It didn’t come on right away, but somewhere between attempt #4 and attempt #5 there was a precipitous drop in her energy level, and her circles around the TARDIS’ controls slowed so much it got to be noticeable. Her feet started dragging, her boots scraping across the metal grating, and her hands moved sluggish over the levers and dials and buttons. Even her words slowed down—she was still talking, they figured she never actually stopped talking—but it got to be more in the way of idle observations, rather than running commentary.

“You all right?” Graham asked, shattering the almost-silence.

“What?” the Doctor asked, jerking her head up from where it had started to droop toward a display. “Yeah. Course I’m all right. Everything’s all right. You’re all right, aren’t ya, Graham?”

“Yeah,” he said, in that uniquely un-ruffleable way he had that reminded Yaz of one of the desk sergeants at work, “But it’s just you looked like you were about to fall asleep over that thing, there. The one that looks sort of like a sextant.”

The Doctor glanced at the console and huffed out a breath that made a lock of her hair flop up a bit and then fall across her nose. The lights and displays flashed and flickered for a moment and she jerked away from them as if she’d been slapped.

“Oi!” she told the console, “Well that’s hardly polite, is it!”

“What?” Ryan asked, bewildered.

“All of you gangin’ up on me, very nice,” the Doctor said blackly, but then she stumbled backward half a step, unsteady beyond what they’d come to consider normal for her. She frowned. “Then again, might have a point.”

“Seriously,” Yaz said, her interest in the conversation shifting toward concern. “Are you feelin’ all right?”

“Feelin’ fine,” the Doctor protested immediately, then leaned a hand on one of the few spots on the console that wasn’t a button. “However, could be I’m... what’s the word.” She scrunched up her nose, looking for whatever bit of vernacular had eluded her this time. “Proper knackered.”

“You haven’t slept since we met ya,” Graham pointed out, propping his hands on his hips.

“That is not true,” the Doctor protested, but it lacked her usual fire.

“She did have a nap on our sofa,” Ryan offered, and shrugged. “But since then, yeah. Nothin’.”

“I don’t need as much sleep as you lot,” she complained.

“That’s fine,” Yaz said, moving a little closer, putting herself more in the Doctor’s immediate line of sight. “But we’ve slept three different times since then. Can y’park this ship of yours or somethin’? Get some sleep?”

The TARDIS wheezed, clunked, and rocked, nearly knocking all four of them off their feet, in a manner suspiciously akin to a bird alighting on a branch.

“I’m going to take that as a yes,” Yaz said.

The Doctor glared at the console, then heaved a sigh, complete with slumped shoulders.

“Fine, you win,” she muttered, waving her hands. “Go on then, time is your own, do what y’like, just don’ fiddle with anythin’ or she’ll get right orn’ry an’ wake me up.” She shuffled off past Ryan and Graham, stifling a yawn as she went. “Back in a few.”

As was becoming their habit, the three of them exchanged several unspoken messages by way of glance and gesture: Graham looked at Ryan, who shrugged and looked at Yaz, who shook her head with a fond-but-weary smile, who looked at Graham, who spread his hands helplessly and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

“Tea, then?”

“Sure,” Ryan said, just as Yaz chuckled and said “Yeah.”

He’d barely had time to put the kettle on in the TARDIS’ small kitchen than there was a sound, a series of almost cartoonish _thumps_. The three of them all looked up and toward the hall like hounds catching a scent, but the Doctor clanging about and making noise was hardly out of the ordinary.

The distant, half-muffled curses that followed, however, _were_.

“Uh,” Ryan said, wary.

Yaz got up from her seat, frowning. “Reckon I should check on her?”

Graham twisted up his mouth, thinking, but then another distant thump came and even before he’d said anything Yaz was heading down the hall to suss out the source of the noise.

She found the door by virtue of the continued string of decidedly impolite language coming from beyond and knocked lightly on it. The noise inside stopped abruptly.

“Doctor?” she asked. “You all right?”

“Not... not particularly,” the Doctor said, with a quality to her voice that said she was raising it but still not managing to be very loud.

Yaz eased the door open, and later would consider herself very lucky that her instinct to take in information won out over her instinct to _laugh her head off_.

The Doctor was lying with her shoulders and back on the floor. She’d evidently managed to get one boot off, because one leg, sock-covered and sticking in the air, was hooked over the corner of her bed, while the other, with boot still on, was resting on the edge of a trunk sitting on the floor. Her pants had slipped up—or was it down, given her current arrangement—to show her knees, and her braces were off her shoulders, draped in a way that could only be described as _artful_ across her hips, her bare belly, and then onto the ground.

Most importantly though, and the source of her current strife, was that she had her arms up around her head, hopelessly entangled into her shirts, her head almost entirely hidden behind cloth. Her hair stuck out here and there, and Yaz could see her chin and lower lip beneath the shirts’ collars. Then it was just white and navy fabric, then narrow elbows and uselessly dangling forearms.

Yaz stared for a moment, trying to unravel what the hell had happened and not be distracted by the sight of the Doctor’s bra and otherwise bare torso where she was sprawled half on the floor.

“Did you...”

“I was _tryin’_ to take my shirts off,” the Doctor explained impatiently from within her cotton prison. “Pulled ‘em over my head like normal, and then _this_ happened.”

“Over your head?” Yaz asked, puzzled. Recognition hit a moment later. “You’ve never worn girls’ shirts before.”

“Not in a very, _very_ long time,” the Doctor said. “Would you mind?”

“Right,” Yaz said, hurrying over to start the surprisingly complex task of pulling the shirts off from around the Doctor’s face—at which point the Doctor let her head thunk back onto the floor with a heavy sigh of relief—and then peeled the two garments off her arms. “There, that’s better, yeah?”

“Ugh,” the Doctor said, and took Yaz’s hand when she offered it, swinging her legs back down to the floor. Yaz pulled her the rest of the way to standing, and the Doctor shook her head, a little like a dog, settling herself. “Never been bested by clothin’ before. No, wait, that’s not quite right. Not like this though.”

Yaz decided not to ask. “Have you never seen a girl take off a shirt before?” The Doctor gave her a rather arch look, and Yaz spluttered, scrabbling to clarify. “I mean, like a t-shirt, how—oh never mind you know what I meant.”

“I do,” the Doctor said, rather magnanimously, saving Yaz from further embarrassing herself. “But yeah, I ‘ave. Never had to do it before though.”

“I think it’s somethin’ ‘bout how they’re made,” Yaz explained, turning the shirts round so they were the right way out and disentangling them from each other, to focus on that instead of the partially undressed woman standing literally within arm’s reach, a woman who was evidently unfazed by that very fact. “Length an’ such. So if you cross your arms and grab the bottom hem, you won’ get trapped in it.”

“Hm,” the Doctor said, but she sounded skeptical. She propped her hands on her hips, her fingers on the metal snaps of her braces where they were pulling at the waistband of her trousers. “Willin’ to stay ‘round while I give it a go? Just. Y’know. In case.”

Yaz felt suddenly grateful that she had not asked for Yaz to _show_ her what she meant, and offered her back the striped navy tee, studiously not watching while the Doctor pulled it back over her head and tugged it down straight.

“Sure, why not. And then you’re gonna get some sleep, yeah?”

“Oh definitely, yeah,” the Doctor said, waving a hand dismissively. “Now how’s that crossover work then?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I finished writing this I told a friend "what I have basically done is reskin the Shortys scene and turn it up to 11" and she immediately replied "Turned it up to... 13 maybe?" and I've never been simultaneously more proud of her and appalled at myself that I didn't see it coming
> 
> Hit me up [on Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/lexraevision)! And if there's prompts you'd like to see me have a go at leave a comment? Might not get to all of them but I'm itching for more ideas.


End file.
